Tim Smit - Guardian of Eden

Tim Smit KBE recently spoke with Caitlin Mackesy Davies about a decade of the Eden Project, the need for ambition, and the strength of an inspirational story.

“I’m about to be shot by my PA,” confides Tim Smit KBE, Chief Executive and Co-founder of the Eden Project, as we approach the forty-five minute mark of a chat that was supposed to take, at most, twenty minutes. The overrun is not surprising, when you are picking the brains of a pioneer of the sustainability movement and an aspirational figure in the world of social enterprise. Here are some of the best snippets of what was said.

As the Eden Project celebrates 10 years, what is your proudest achievement there?

“I am most proud of the fact that we are still here, and that we are still capable of behaving as if we are a start-up. We haven’t become institutionalised. Rather a lot is made about being creative, which in our context means always asking if something can be done differently or better. For most projects, we try to imagine that something doesn’t exist and start again. And that approach is as relevant to a health service as it is to a community project.”

And what’s next for the project?

“We are fortunate to have the best acoustics of any arena in the world, and we are now on the verge of launching a television channel for music with a number of partners. We’re also working with Michael Grandage, Artistic Director at the Donmar Warehouse, to build a 500-seat theatre, and are in the final stages of building the first geothermal energy plant in the country.

There’s a great emphasis on education at the Eden Project. Why is this so important?

We don’t see education as being about children and schools, it is for everybody. And one of the things that we are particularly interested in is narrative. We do work in a number of countries in Africa and we are twinned with the Maldives (which is due to go carbon neutral over the next ten years), and what is really interesting is that one of the skills that has left our culture – and which we are very much in need of – is storytelling.

Edenis regularly held up as the best example of a successful social enterprise. Do you feel the model is taking off?

Every year, the same four or five social enterprises are held up as the example and I find it quite disappointing that not many more have joined our ranks. There’s a sort of library hush when people talk about social enterprise, as if they were set up to help people who couldn’t otherwise get a job to find employment. Ambition is almost a rude word, and there is a terrible shyness about the words sustainability and viability. It is desperate when, in fact, I believe is one of the most exciting corporate structures to emerge over the past 250 years.

Why do you feel it is such an exciting model?

The governance structure of an ordinary PLC demands, by law, that it maximise its profit. The actual motivation to be good, and nice, and environmentally friendly is almost illegal unless you can prove that it is better for your company. That could be in terms of brand, and it could be in terms of attracting better people. But it has to be legitimised.

The social enterprise is an interesting model, because it is able to adapt its memoranda and articles to talk about optimising profits rather than maximising, and the shareholder structure can mirror that. So the way you can do it, is to say “this company defines profit as surpluses that are created after the company has done the following things”, and that is a huge change. Taking this further, in my view you should be able to have a company that is 51% owned by the community and 49% by private equity, for example, in such way that the rules and regulations that surround that company are dominated by the community, which would enable the investment and equity players to take an appropriate return. And the really exciting landscape in front of us is if we can find an effective narrative that can enable big companies to become social operators part of the time.

The issue of “appropriate return” and City bonuses is very much at issue just now. What are your views?

I accept totally that if someone makes a huge sum of money through really successfully implementing a business strategy that creates value everywhere, they need to be really well paid. But very often board members of big companies use the accounting systems of those companies to accrue what look like profits, but are actually skillful redefinitions of capital value that allow them to take huge bonuses.

I also think there is something morally wrong with a bunch of people whose profession it is to act as financiers to how our society grows – to provide the finance for trade and manufacture – to themselves use the devices formerly used for trade and manufacturing to make money by betting on the failure of stocks and shares or currency. This skews the market, which affects every citizen.

What other ways are there to address the desire for growth?

There are ways of looking at growth that are very, very different. In Britain you have nearly three million people unemployed and nearly four million active people past retirement age. When you look at all of the hardware that is locked up and never used, ranging from boats in harbours to cranes, you are looking at trillions of pounds worth of capacity. And to take our conversation around full circle, if you can find a story that can harness those things, you can have enormous growth out of what exists already.

A friend told me this great fact, that if every person who is unemployed in this country were to cut one block of stone a day, you could build the pyramid of Cheops every six and a half days. How different would it feel if we said to people who are unemployed: “We have this transformational project, that while you are temporarily unemployed, you will be able to tell your grandchildren you worked on.”  Part of our problem is a lack of bloody ambition. If we started building wonderful things, and wonderful places, that everybody could give their labour to, it would be a very different message. And there would be a bit of nobility, rather than serfdom, in it.

How are you helping to unlock this potential at the Eden Project in your other work?

Do you know HG Wells’ story The Invisible Man? You can only see the Invisible Man if he covers himself in bandages or if you throw flour on him. I like to think of the Eden Project as throwing flour across the nation and seeing all the hidden reserves.